Kincaid's Battery eBook

The damsel blushed worse. “Well, at any
rate,” she said, “the case doesn’t
in any slightest way involve Miss Valcour.”

“Oh, I know that!” was the cocksure reply
as they alighted in Canal Street to take an up-town
mule-car.

Could Madame and Flora have overheard, how they would
have smiled to each other.

With now a wary forward step and now a long pause,
and now another short step and another pause, Hilary,
in his letters to Anna, despite Flora’s often
successful contrivings, had ventured back toward that
understanding for which the souls of both were starving,
until at length he had sent one which seemed, itself,
to kneel, for him, at her feet—­would have
seemed, had it not miscarried. But, by no one’s
craft, merely through the “terribleness”
of the times, it had gone forever astray. When,
not knowing this, he despatched another, this latter
had promptly arrived, but its unintelligible allusions
to lines in the lost forerunner were unpardonable
for lack of that forerunner’s light, and it
contained especially one remark—­trivial
enough—­which, because written in the irrepressible
facetiousness so inborn in him, but taken, alas! in
the ineradicable earnest so natural to her, had compelled
her to reply in words which made her as they went,
and him as they smote him, seem truly to have “aged
three years in one.” Yet hardly had they
left her before you would have said she had recovered
the whole three years and a fraction over, on finding
a postscript, till then most unaccountably overlooked,
which said that its writer had at that moment been
ordered (as soon as he could accomplish this and that
and so and so) to hasten home to recruit the battery
with men of his own choice, and incidentally to bring
the wounded Charlie with him. Such godsends raise
the spring-tides of praise and human kindness in us,
and it was on the very next morning, after finding
that postscript, that there had come to Anna her splendid
first thought of the Bazaar.

And now behold it, a visible reality! Unlighted
as yet, unpeopled, but gorgeous, multiform, sentinelled,
and ready, it needed but the touch of the taper to
set forth all the glories of art and wealth tenfolded
by self-sacrifice for a hallowed cause. Here
was the Bazaar, and yonder, far away on the southern
border of Tennessee, its wasted ranks still spruce
in their tatters, the battery; iron-hearted Bartleson
in command; its six yellow daughters of destruction
a trifle black in the lips, but bright on the cheeks
and virgins all; Charlie on the roster though not
in sight, the silken-satin standard well in view, rent
and pierced, but showing seven red days of valor legended
on its folds, and with that white-moustached old centaur,
Maxime, still upholding it in action and review.

Intermediate, there, yonder, and here, from the farthest
Mississippi State line clear down to New Orleans,
were the camps of instruction, emptying themselves
northward, pouring forth infantry, cavalry, artillery
by every train that could be put upon the worn-out
rails and by every main-travelled wagon road.
But homeward-bound Charlie and his captain, where
were they? Irby knew.